Elon Musk Oversold Solar Roof To Analysts Long Before Product Was Ready

During an August 2016 earnings conference for SolarCity, a company for which Elon Musk served on the board, he asked, “What if we can offer you a roof that looks way better than a normal roof? That lasts far longer than a normal roof?” The business magnate added, “Different ball game.” But the kind of solar tiles he was speaking of that resembled real roof tiles were nowhere close to being ready, according to a Fast Company piece detailing the merger between Tesla and SolarCity.

SolarCity was a company started by brothers Peter and Lyndon Rive in 2006. The brothers started the solar company with help from their cousin Elon Musk in the form of a ten million dollar investment. The company sold solar panel systems using an innovative lease system. They would sell the roofs as leases, taking on a lot of the upfront cost, and use government solar tax credits to help defray the cost.

The company did well at first, growing exponentially before finally going public in 2012. Their stocks grew through 2014 before a few factors led to trouble.

The solar company started to feel that it had grown too fast and was publically spread thin. The solar market wasn’t as bullish as before, and SolarCity’s stocks fell 77 percent from their 2014 high. According to Fast Company, that’s when Musk stepped in.

Because of conflicts of interest, the companies had to operate separately and distanced from each other. But Musk wanted Tesla to acquire SolarCity. Musk said a solar roof company with installation services would fit in perfectly with what Tesla was doing. In 2015 Tesla developed a battery called the Powerall, designed for storing energy to power homes.

Musk sold the idea of the future, pushing solar tiles that looked like regular house tiles to shareholders and analysts before the tiles were ready to be manufactured. Musk wasn’t even thrilled with some of the initial solar tile products SolarCity were making.

The merger happened in late 2016, Tesla acquired the solar company for just under three billion dollars. Currently, SolarCity has not quite reached its projections for tile outputs, and one of its founders, Lyndon Rives, has left the company.

Tesla is underway preparing for the release of its newest car, the Model Three, which is set to begin rolling out in 2018. The company took 373,000 reservations for the car, each made with a $1,000 deposit.

Musk has continued to push his idea for an environmentally friendly future, regardless of the what the motivation of the SolarCity deal was. Just last week he made a statement by publically announcing he would leave the White House advisory council he was on. This was in reaction to President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Accords, breaking with former President Obama’s environmentally friendly agenda.